The patients may experience distress not only in association with external stressors, but also in relation to the onset or the progression of the disease itself. Diagnosis, relapsing episodes and a worsening of physical functioning may be perceived as traumatic events and may give rise to physiological and emotional posttraumatic symptoms and, in some cases, to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). According to the DSM IV-TR, PTSD is a clinical condition characterised by "the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury or other threat to physical integrity. The person's response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness. The characteristic symptoms resulting from the exposure to the extreme trauma include persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event, persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal. The full symptom picture must be present for more than one month and the disturbance must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning" [DSM IV]. Many psychological treatments are available for PTSD, ranging from individual therapy to family therapy and support groups together with interpersonal, relational and psychodynamic psychotherapies; their focus is to desensitise the trauma memory and the meaning of the trauma as well as its power to affect relationships. Among these therapies, the two elective treatments according to international guidelines are the Trauma-focused Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy(CBT-TF) and Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR). CBT-TF focuses on thoughts and beliefs helping people to overcome fear about their painful memories by talking about the trauma repeatedly or by imagining the situation that is realistically safe although still frightening. EMDR is based on the accelerated information processing model integrating elements of different psychotherapies and it is applied through an eight-phase approach. In the EMDR, the patient is induced to focus on his/her negative thoughts, image and body sensation while receiving an "alternate stimulus" (such as eye movements, hand taps or sounds). This procedure leads to desensitisation and emotional reprocessing.